- Number 425 |
- October 27, 2014
-
Study sheds new light on why batteries go bad
A comprehensive look at how tiny particles in a lithium ion battery electrode behave shows that rapid-charging the battery and using it to do high-power, rapidly draining work may not be as damaging as researchers had thought – and that the benefits of slow draining and charging may have been overestimated.
The results challenge the prevailing view that “supercharging” batteries is always harder on battery electrodes than charging at slower rates, according to researchers from Stanford University and the Stanford Institute for Materials & Energy Sciences (SIMES) at DOE’s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory. -
More haste, less waste
Like a sleek, modern sports car, a climate model has a complex computer engine running underneath. As the demand grows for the models to produce faster simulations with more details, the computer engine takes up more time and space. This computational cost edges some climate questions out of the nation’s limited number of supercomputers. Using a novel computational approach, scientists at DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory found a way to reduce the computational cost dramatically and get the climate answers hundreds of times faster.
The PNNL team calculated the climate simulations from a number of short simulations rather than from a single, multi-year simulation. Using the Community Atmosphere Model, they initialized the short simulations with different weather conditions so that they were independent runs, carried out simultaneously. -
Industry, investors count on NREL's modeling tools
Whenever installers attach solar panels to rooftops, utilities debate the merits of a wind farm, or investors mull the potential return on a concentrating solar power (CSP) plant, there's a good chance that the performance and risk models created by DOE's National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) come into play.
Can a rooftop photovoltaic (PV) system work for all the homeowners in a particular neighborhood, or only for the ones with a 40-degree pitch to their roofs? Will the wind resource that works in a west Texas county work as well one county over?
-
Four Corners methane hotspot points to coal-related sources
A large, persistent methane hot spot has existed over the Four Corners area of the U.S. Southwest for almost a decade, confirmed by remote regional-scale ground measurements of the gas by DOE's Los Alamos National Laboratory.
“A detailed analysis indicates that methane emissions in the region are actually three times larger than reported by EPA. Our analysis demonstrates that current EPA inventories are missing huge methane sources in the region,” said Manvendra Dubey, a Los Alamos National Laboratory scientist on the project. “We attribute this hot spot to fugitive leaks from coal-bed methane that actually preceded recent concerns about potential emissions from fracking,” Dubey said.